Posts filed under 'Obama'

This little snippet jumped out at me from a story about how Republicans hate Obama’s decision to defer a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline because he hates America:

Jim Oddie, a scuba instructor… ticked off the reasons Obama might have nixed the pipeline. “He doesn’t play for our team,” he said. “He wasn’t raised in the mainland of the United States. He doesn’t think America is exceptional. Come on—he grew up in Hawaii in 1961 when it had been a state for less than two years. Spent time in Indonesia.”

I wonder if this guy came out with this himself, or if these are the new talking points circulating around in right-wing Tea Party-land. They grudgingly admit that yeah, Obama was born in the US, but it doesn’t really count because Hawaii is barely part of America, and he spent time in another country!

Unlike full-on birtherism, this narrative has the virtue of being factually correct, but it still arrives at the same ridiculous place. I’m sure the many middle-aged Hawaiians (and probably Alaskans) will be surprised to hear that they’re not really Americans because they weren’t “raised in the mainland”.

A former top executive at Citigroup who participated in the deregulation of Wall Street during the Clinton administration and recently was tapped by President Barack Obama for a top White House post told a Senate panel last week that deregulation didn’t lead to the recent financial crisis.

Jacob “Jack” Lew, Obama’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, the White House agency entrusted with ensuring that federal regulations reflect the president’s agenda, was asked Thursday during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Budget Committee by Sen. Bernie Sanders whether he believed that the “deregulation of Wall Street, pushed by people like Alan Greenspan [and] Robert Rubin, contributed significantly to the disaster we saw on Wall Street.”

Lew, a former OMB chief for President Bill Clinton, told the panel that “the problems in the financial industry preceded deregulation,” and after discussing those issues, added that he didn’t “personally know the extent to which deregulation drove it, but I don’t believe that deregulation was the proximate cause.“

Well, I guess that explains how the resolutely obstructionist GOP allowed him to be confirmed as the head of OMB…

This ongoing cycle of a new Republican candidate catching fire every month and then abruptly fizzling again, reminds me of nothing so much as the last three elections, which have whiplashed from “throw all the Republican bums out” to “throw all the Democratic bums out”.

It’s like watching someone angrily mashing the remote over and over again in the desperate hope that if they keep clicking long enough they’ll miraculously find a channel that doesn’t suck.

Glenn Greenwald and Taylor Marsh helpfully explain why it is impossible to view Obama as a Democrat in any meaningful way other than “less insane and slightly less awful than the Republican candidates”.

No, I’m not going to support Ron Paul or any of the other Republican candidates, but as Taylor Marsh puts it, “Pres. Obama has helped Democrats deliver a climate that this party has threatened since the ’70s would happen if I didn’t vote for them.”

Amazing. David Brooks actually acknowledges that Obama really isn’t nearly as anti-business and pro-regulation as Republicans keep claiming he is, and even admits that what regulation there is has not been the cause our chronic high unemployment.

He still seems to think Obama’s imposed too much regulation, just because. But at least it’s progress of a sort.

Obama said he has been accused by Republicans of fomenting class warfare.

“You know what, if asking a millionaire to pay the same tax rate as a plumber makes me a class warrior, a warrior for the working class, I will accept that. I will wear that charge as a badge of honor,” the president said.

Awesome! I guess that means that Obama will grudgingly implement minor reforms and stop opposing major ones if the working class rises up as one and embarrasses the shit out of him.

And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I will put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I’ll will walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America. Because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.

As you will recall, when American workers were denied their right to collectively bargain in Wisconsin, Obama did precisely nothing. And now…

“Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes,” he said, his voice rising as applause and cheers mounted. “Shake it off. Stop complainin’. Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We are going to press on. We have work to do.”

You have some nerve, Mr. President. Don’t ask anyone on the left to march with you if you’re not willing to march with them.

“I’m glad the election’s not today,” said Democratic pollster Keith Frederick, a veteran of House races. “Every poll shows independents losing their patience for the president. These House elections tend to get nationalized, and there’s no doubt right now that as a referendum on Barack Obama, House Democrats lose.”

I would love to know what makes Frederick think that Obama is going to be more popular in 2012. If Democrats think the jobs bill is going to be enough to save them, they are sadly mistaken. Especially after Obama strips it of everything but corporate tax breaks and forces Democrats to vote for it.

“I strongly disagree with Ralph Nader. As I’ve said many times before, I believe that re-electing President Obama is an absolute imperative for our economy, our judicial system, for progressives and for our country,” said former Sen. Russ Feingold, who announced recently that he was not running for Wisconsin’s open Senate seat.

Really? Because Obama has been incompetent on the economy (and frighteningly pro-austerity), downright destructive to progressives, and has all but ignored the judiciary. More from Feingold:

Now, facing Republican candidates that are bought-and-sold by corporate money, and who want to give more tax breaks to the wealthiest and attack the rights of working Americans, the President is fighting to create jobs and provide economic security for middle class families.

Again, who is Russ talking about? Obama is almost as much a corporate creature as the Republicans, strong-armed congressional Democrats into extending Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, and has twiddled his thumbs on jobs until just recently.

I’m still not quite at the point where I would say I would prefer a Republican president, but I can’t think of a single persuasive reason why Obama deserves to keep his job. If we could get a Democratic nominee who might actually be a good president, I’d be all for it.

Despite what you hear in elite commentary, the President’s support among base voters and in key demographic groups has stayed strong. According to the latest NBC-WSJ poll, Democrats approve of his performance by an 81%-14% margin. That’s stronger than President Clinton’s support among Democrats at this point in his term and, according to Gallup, stronger than any Democratic President dating back to Harry Truman through this point in their presidency.

Only 48% of Democrats on our most recent national survey said they were ‘very excited’ about voting in 2012. On the survey before that the figure was 49%. Those last two polls are the only times all year the ‘very excited’ number has dipped below 50%.

In 13 polls before August the average level of Democrats ‘very excited’ about voting next year had averaged 57%. It had been as high as 65% and only twice had the number even dipped below 55%.

The other is that since Election Day 2008, the breakdown of party affiliation has gone from 28/37/33 Republican/Independent/Democrat to 28/44/26. Which kinda suggests to me that Obama just managed to drive 7% of the electorate out of the Democratic Party entirely. If you add those people back in, then Obama’s approval rating is more like 64% among people who were Democrats when Obama was elected.

Granted, that’s probably an oversimplification, but the shrinkage in Democratic affiliation is almost certainly inflating Obama’s approval rating there, in much the same way that ignoring people who have given up looking for work understates the true scope of unemployment.

Never mind that Obama was a lousy president who collaborated with (or at the very least capitulated to) the GOP and frittered away huge congressional majorities long before Bill Daley showed up, or any other little minor details like that…

I think the main reason for the focus on Bill Daley is that he’s not Obama, or Geithner, or Holder, or any of Obama’s other corrupt and/or craven agency heads and cabinet members. Obama sucked before Bill Daley, and he continues to suck now. Bill Daley is not the problem, although he is equally clearly not the solution.

I think I have finally figured it out: By co-opting Republican positions on issues like extraction, tax cuts, regulations, and austerity, Obama is forcing the GOP to become more and more insane in order to stay to the right of him as an opposition party, thus making itself less and less appealing to non-crazy voters.

Obama isn’t following the Republicans to the right, he’s pushing them.

Looking for another way to give desperate people false hope and pretend to solve the problem while actually just benefiting corporations? I know! Let’s let people on unemployment work for free and call it “training”!

Ezra Klein explains that Obama couldn’t possibly have done a better job, what with his miniscule majorities in both houses of Congress and all. I particularly like the part where he suggests that Obama would have been less popular and the 2010 bloodbath would have been worse if Obama had passed an effective stimulus and generally done more to live up to his campaign promises.

Because the American people just hate strong politicians who get results, especially when they don’t act like corporate tools. That’s why FDR was only able to get elected 4 times. Well, that and dying.

Apparently the teabaggers are basically just rebranded Republican theocrats. If they’re political independents, it’s only because the Republican Party isn’t sufficiently suffused with right-wing religious fanaticism.

But the joke’s on them, because now they’re even less popular than the religious right, and even atheists and Muslims. Why, they’re even less popular than Obama’s record on the economy, and that’s saying something.

The Tea Party really is the best hope Obama and the Democrats have next year – that they nominate more unelectable crazies like Sharron Angle, Linda McMahon and Christine O’Donnell, and that voters turn against the teabaggers that they elected last year. Lesser of two evils is pretty much all they have going for them next year, so they’re going to have to be pretty damn lesser to overcome the enthusiasm gap (who could have predicted that the party that strokes its base would get better turnout than the party that kicks theirs?).

The NYT recently revived Obama’s old quote from early in his presidency that he would rather be a good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president, in the context of talking about what he has to do to turn his presidency around before he’s up for re-election. But really, that only makes sense if you buy the premise that he hasn’t been a good president, which can only be properly evaluated if you know what his goals are.

There is room for agreement between the two views, however: Regardless of whether Obama is a successful Republican or an unsuccessful Democrat, he has been an absolutely miserable politician who has demoralized his own base, alienated independents, and done nothing to win over Republicans. (Well, actually, he’s done quite a lot to win over Republicans, but none of it has worked.) And the economy and employment situation is still terrible, although I suppose that could also be considered a matter of perspective – the wealthy are still doing fine, if not better, but the overwhelming majority of the electorate are not feeling very secure.

So is Obama a good president or a mediocre one? I think the answer mainly depends on how much money you have. Is he a one-term president or a two-term one? I think the answer mainly depends on how crazy the Republican nominee is.

And really, who can blame them? Both parties got their shot at running the government, and both parties failed miserably because they cared more about their corporate and wealthy donors than the people they were elected to serve.

There is definitely room for a third party (although it would really be more like a second party at this point), but not if it’s just a corporate “centrist” party positioned between the other two corporate parties. The only kind of third party that’s going to gain any traction would be a populist one that promises to represent ordinary people instead of corporations and the wealthy.

I agree with a lot of this Peter Daou post, especially about how the right has effectively stepped into and taken advantage of this country’s information and education vacuum, and how the left is hobbled by the lack of any kind of common cause between the progressive movement and the Democratic Party. But I’m not so sure I buy his diagnosis of the root cause:

On the other side you have the Democratic establishment, political leaders, pollsters and strategists who, by and large, are poll addicts, chronically incapable of taking principled stands, obsessed with appealing to independent voters, hostile to progressive advocates, often just as captive to moneyed interests as their Republican counterparts. Mind-bogglingly, it was the White House and Democratic leadership that worked with BP to ‘disappear’ the Gulf spill, for fear it would harm them in the 2010 midterms. Craven doesn’t begin to describe it.

(…)

As I said previously, faced with a public that holds opposing views, politicians can either change their positions to match the public’s views or change the public’s views to match their positions. Only when Democrats decide to do the latter will America’s rightward shift be halted or reversed.

I believe that Obama and most of the Democrats are actually Republicans masquerading as weak Democrats, and all the poll-driven, center-chasing wimpiness is camouflage to make their pro-corporate policies look like some kind of pragmatic (albeit misguided) centrism rather than the corrupt sellout that they actually are.

On a related note, I think it’s hilarious that the White House keeps complaining that progressives aren’t doing a good enough job of selling the American people on the Satan sandwiches they keep offering up, when the real problem is that we can’t convince the White House to stop making them.

Republicans will still be able to refuse to raise taxes. But if they do, it won’t matter. The only way they can succeed in keeping taxes from rising is if the Obama administration and the Democrats stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them to extend the Bush tax cuts.

In the winning column, he lists Mitch McConnell, the Tea Party, Obama, the Congressional Budget Office, Grover Norquist, and – I’m not kidding – David Wu.

In the losing column, he lists Congress, the Gang Of Six, commissions, and liberals.

Missing from either list: The economy or the American people. Just like they were missing from all the political calculations and posturing by Obama and the Tea Party, who collaborated to produce a terrible deal that will make the country weaker and maybe even increase the debt it was supposed to reduce.

You also have to love this little snippet of DLC-style conventional wisdom:

But remember that Obama’s target constituency in 2012 is not his base but rather independent and moderate voters. And those fence-sitters love compromise in almost any form.

Yep, there’s nothing independents and moderates love more than politicians with no convictions at all (I personally believe Obama is a strong Republican masquerading as a weak Democrat, but the appearance is the same). And of course they always turn out in droves, not like a motivated Democratic base would.

I understand that most politicians – and much of the media who cover them – are corrupt, shallow, self-centered creatures, and it’s folly to expect them to always put the good of the country first. But couldn’t they at least think about it a little bit?

Almost as amazing as Obama’s apparent belief that cutting Social Security and Medicare without requiring any “shared sacrifice” from the corporations or individuals who can most afford it will somehow improve his prospects for re-election.

MR. HARWOOD: Tomorrow you’re going to give a speech and talk about your economic stimulus package…It looks like it’s going to be at the high end of your range, around $775 billion. If it’s correct that, as your aides have said, the danger is doing too little rather than too much…why stop at $775 billion? Why not go to the 1.2 trillion (dollars) that some economists have recommended?

PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA: …We’ve seen ranges from 800 to 1.3 trillion, and our attitude was that, given the legislative process, if we start towards the low end of that, we’ll see how it develops….

That’s the Obama approach to negotiating in a nutshell right there, and the results have been predictably awful. Look, if someone says they’re going to open with their minimum position and then work their way towards their maximum position, they are either clueless, lying about which direction their max position is… or a Republican on the other side of the table from Obama.

Even the prospect of cutting Social Security wasn’t enough for Republicans to get over their hatred of taxes. I guess Obama will just have to offer them up a plan that cuts Social Security and leaves tax loopholes alone now.

I thought it was particularly telling that when offered a deficit reduction plan that raises taxes and cuts Social Security, it was the taxes that the Obama-Wants-To-Kill-Grandma Party publicly objected to. But I guess if they complain about Social Security cuts, they won’t be able to accept whatever Obama’s safety-net-destroying Grand Bargain turns out to be.

Andrea Tantaros brags about what an awesome decisive straight shooter Michele Bachmann is. Um, our last president was a decisive straight shooter too, and the country still hasn’t recovered. A decisive straight shooter is not such an asset when they’re wrong all the time, about everything.

Besides, I think she’s being unfair to Obama: He knows exactly what he wants, he just has to put on a show and pretend that he wants the exact opposite. Then he pragmatically “compromises” back to his true position.

Obama has mastered the art of achieving Republican goals through questionable compromises and concessions. If he’s not a corporatist deficit hawk, then he is the weakest or dumbest president we have ever had. And I really don’t think he’s either.

Obama starts at a progressive or moderate position and ends up at a Republican one. Not because he has to, but because he wants to.

I hate to defend Obama, especially on unemployment where he truly is awful, but this is just silly:

OBAMA [explaining lack of private sector hiring]: Well, I don’t think it’s a matter of me being unable to convince them to hire more people. They’re making decisions based on what they think will be good for their companies. A couple of things have happened. Look, we went through the worst crisis since the Great Depression…..The other thing that happened, though, and this goes to the point you were just making, is there are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM; you don’t go to a bank teller. Or you go to the airport, and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate….

Yesterday, Barack Obama gave away the game. Without actually using the words, Barack Obama admitted he is completely and utterly ignorant about job creation and economics. In an interview with the Today Show, Barack Obama declared that the unemployment rate remains so high because of ATMS.

(…)

Limbaugh: Obama “Cited ATM Machines As A Reason For High Unemployment.” During his June 14 radio program, Rush Limbaugh said:

There’s a new reason for high unemployment as told by Obama. He had that interview with Ann Curry at the Today Show, and basically there’s too much automation out there. He cited ATM machines as a reason for high unemployment. No, no. I kid you not. That’s right! Obama explained to NBC News the reason that companies are not hiring is not because of his policies, it’s because the economy is so automated….

He actually said this.

So Obama says that employment is down because companies aren’t hiring in a down economy and people are being replaced by machines, such as but not limited to ATMs and ticket kiosks – both of which happen to be true – and the right freaks out that “Obama said ATMs are the sole cause of unemployment. What a maroon!”